Michael Winship: History will tell lies, sir, as usual’

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day. The GOP always seems to purge its leadership ranks on Monday — just when I’m sweating the deadline for this column, so I have to start all over.

Michael Winship

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day. The GOP always seems to purge its leadership ranks on Monday — just when I’m sweating the deadline for this column, so I have to start all over. I swear, it’s the work of that vast right-wing conspiracy. Go pick on somebody your own size, damnit.

The Tom DeLay resignation story broke late on a Monday night. Karl Rove resigned on a Monday. And now, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Events of the last couple of weeks, including the Gonzales departure — so reminiscent of Watergate days — are a reminder that the ghosts of history are ever present, but like all spirits, subject to interpretation. “Nothing changes more constantly than the past,” the great Southern journalist and thinker Gerald White Johnson once wrote.

“For the past that influences our lives does not consist of what actually happened, but of what men believe happened.”

On Aug. 17, Carolyn Goodman died. She was 91, the mother of 20-year-old Andrew Goodman, one of three young civil rights workers — Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney — murdered in Mississippi in 1964 during the Freedom Summer voter registration drive.

I met her in 1979. She had suggested that my colleagues and I make a film about the deaths of her son and the two other young men.

We traveled to Mississippi to attend a 15-year reunion of the civil rights workers and were startled at how many different interpretations there were of the events of Freedom Summer, how despite time’s passing, deep wounds remained and festered.

Funds never came through, so we never made the film. But Carolyn Goodman persevered, telling her son’s story and fighting against injustice right up to her death. Two years ago, she testified against former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Jay Killen, indicted for the murders of Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney (he was found guilty of manslaughter).

Just last Friday, a federal judge sentenced another former Klan member, James Seale, to three life sentences for the murders of two black teenagers in Mississippi, also in 1964. Their bodies were uncovered during the search for Goodman’s son and his companions.

According to The New York Times, “At a press conference after the sentencing, Assistant Attorney General Wan J. Kim said that some 100 cold cases from the civil rights era were awaiting investigation and possible prosecution, including 30 in Mississippi.”

In case you thought such ghosts of the past were no longer relevant, reflect on the immigration debate and its heavy-handed racial subtext.

Of course, when it comes to drawing historic, ’60s/’70s parallels with our current miasma, the big enchilada is Vietnam. Last week, in his speech before the VFW, El Matador Bush tried using it to pull off a dazzling 180 reversal, a perfectly executed veronica, but came up short. The bull won.

While once this administration scorned any comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq, suddenly they’re welcome. That is, as long as they’re framed in the context of the alleged cost of failure. The president declared, “One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”

Except that, as historians like military analyst Anthony Cordesman rushed to say, “in basic historical terms the president misstated what happened in Vietnam.” And what is happening in Iraq.

The Vietnam/Cambodia-like tragedy Bush predicts for Iraq if we withdraw has, in large part, already taken place, and on our watch. Cordesman told the Chicago Tribune, “We are already talking about a country where the impact of our invasion has driven two million people out of the country, will likely drive out two million more, has reduced eight million people to dire poverty, has killed 100,000 people and wounded 100,000 people more. One sort of sits in awe at the lack of historical comparability.”

In his play “The Devil’s Disciple,” George Bernard Shaw has another military man — British Gen. “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne — say of the impending Battle of Saratoga, “History, sir, will tell lies, as usual.”

But the worst lies come from those who willfully ignore or distort the truths the past presents us, who foolheartedly march us into an uncertain, unholy future and dare to call it victory.

Michael Winship, a native of Canandaigua, is a freelance television writer in Manhattan.